Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank was born on June 12, 1929, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Edith and Otto Frank. Her older sister, Margot, completed the family. The Franks were Reform Jews, meaning they did not follow all Jewish customs, and they lived in a mixed community of Jews and non-Jews. Otto and Edith valued learning and had a large home library. The family first lived at Marbachweg 307 in Frankfurt-Eckenheim, then moved in 1931 to Ganghoferstraße 24 in the Dichterviertel area. Both houses still stand.

After the Nazi Party won the federal election in 1933 and Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Edith took Anne and Margot to stay with her mother, Rosa Hollander, in Aachen. Otto stayed in Frankfurt but soon received a job offer in Amsterdam, working for Opekta, a company that sold pectin. He moved there to set up the business and find housing. Edith traveled between Aachen and Amsterdam, eventually renting an apartment on Merwedeplein in the Rivierenbuurt neighborhood, where many Jewish-German refugees lived. Edith joined Otto in November 1933, Margot followed a month later, and Anne stayed with her grandmother until February 1934, when the whole family reunited in Amsterdam.

The Franks were among the 300,000 Jews who left Germany between 1933 and 1939. In Amsterdam, Margot attended public school and became a top student despite initial trouble with Dutch. Anne started at the 6th Montessori School in 1934 and quickly made friends, including Hanneli Goslar. In 1957, the school was renamed the Anne Frank School. In 1938, Otto started a second company, Pectacon, a wholesaler of herbs and spices. Hermann van Pels, a Jewish butcher who had fled Osnabrück, worked there as a spice advisor. In 1939, Edith’s mother Rosa moved in with the Franks; she died in January 1942. In May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the occupation government began imposing restrictive laws on Jews. Otto tried to emigrate to the United States, but his visa application was never processed because the US consulate in Rotterdam was destroyed by German bombing on May 14, 1940, losing all paperwork.

On July 22, 1941, 12-year-old Anne was filmed watching a neighbor’s wedding from her balcony—the only known footage of her. After the summer of 1941, she was barred from attending her school. In July 1942, as persecution of Jews intensified, the family went into hiding in a secret annex behind a bookcase in the building where Otto worked. They were arrested by the Gestapo on August 4, 1944, after two years in hiding. After their arrest, the Franks were sent to concentration camps. On November 1, 1944, Anne and Margot were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they died, likely of typhus, a few months later. The Red Cross estimated their death in March 1945, with Dutch authorities setting March 31 as the official date; later research suggests they may have died in February or early March.

Otto Frank was the only Holocaust survivor in the family. He returned to Amsterdam after the war and found that his secretaries, Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, had saved Anne’s diary. Moved by her wish to become an author, Otto published the diary in 1947. Originally titled *Het Achterhuis* in Dutch (meaning “the back house” or “The Secret Annex”), it was first published in English in 1952 as *The Diary of a Young Girl*. It has since been translated into over 70 languages, making Anne one of the most-discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust and her diary one of the world’s best-known books, adapted into plays and films.